Now that our iOS build is finished of meals to go we can do the same thing we
did on Android and we can download the IPA file.
This is the iPhone application file.
So it's it's a bit different than what
Android outputs because it's supposed to run on iOS and when we download this file
what we can do or what we can try is to try to run it on our simulator.
And the way that we would do that is if we go over here and we took our IPA file
we could drag and drop it into the simulator and by dragging and dropping it
into the simulator what would happen is it would try to save it on the iPhone.
Now this doesn't work.
This doesn't work at all.
This is not how iOS goes and installs files so it works fairly differently than
it would on Android.
This is not how we go about installing
these applications.
You can't just drag and drop an IPA file.
So how do we run it on our simulator then?
Well, what we can do is we can go back to
Expo build iOS and we can specifically save the simulator build.
So this is going to create an optimized build specifically to run on the simulator.
It cannot be opened on a legitimate iPhone, but you could drag and drop it on
your simulator.
So if we go back over here to Expo builds
what we're going to see is that we've queued a build specifically for the
simulator and once this build has finished what we can do is we can
download the output and drag and drop that into our simulator.
So while this build is processing for the simulator, you may be asking well, how do
I run it on an actual device?
Well to test it on a device you need to
use something called TestFlight and then you need to download the IPA file to your
local machine, which we had already done and with the App Store Connect, which is
a specific app that you need to use in order to upload, you need to upload this
IPA file into TestFlight.
So there's a whole process here that can
only be done if you have an iOS device, if you have a MacBook.
You cannot do this on a Windows machine.
You cannot do this on a Linux machine.
So we're running into the limitations of being outside of iOS and the Apple environment.
So now that this simulator build has completed we can press the download
button here and what we're going to see is that where it downloaded an IPA for
the production build, now it's downloading a tar .gz, so a zip file.
Interesting.
What will that zip file contain?
And it's way smaller.
And if we open that zip file up, what
we're going to see is that it's going to output this Meals -to -Go that we can
drag and drop inside of our simulator.
And what that's going to do is it's going
to install a simulator build of our production app and now we can see Meals
-to -Go running on our simulator.
If we open that up, what we can do now is
we can test out our application as if it was a production build that was coming
from the App Store.
And what we can then see is that we're
able to test our application and all of the different aspects and unlike Android
where we needed to set up a Google Maps key because Android works with Google
Maps, the Apple Maps works out of the box and does not need those additional steps
in order to function.
So knowing that, we now know the
different types of builds that we can generate for iOS.
We can generate a production level build that can only be distributed through
TestFlight to live devices, Apple TestFlight, or we can generate an iOS
simulator build that can actually run on our simulator to test what exactly is
going on.
Now with that said, this is the actual
build that we need to submit to the Apple App Store in order to get that running.
So let's take a look at how that would work.